Nine out of 10 cloud computing users remain concerned about cloud security, yet 77% of businesses already use some form of cloud computing.

Those findings come from a survey conducted by Harris Interactive for Novell, which asked 210 IT professionals — ranging from managers to CEOs — at organizations with more than 1,000 employees about their company’s adoption of cloud computing.

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According to Novell, “the research strongly suggests cloud computing — both public and private — will be an increasing part of the mix of resources deployed by enterprise IT organizations, and that companies are particularly interested in simplifying management across their integrated physical, virtual, and cloud environments.”

But from a security standpoint, related concerns are a primary barrier to cloud computing adoption for 50% of respondents. Indeed, 76% think that private data is more secure when stored on the premises, rather than with a vendor, and 81% worry about maintaining compliance with regulations if they store sensitive data in the cloud.

Even with such security concerns, however, according to Novell, the survey found “much broader adoption of cloud computing than has been suggested by previous research, and shows accelerating momentum behind developing private cloud infrastructures.”

Today, for example, about one-third of organizations already use a mixture of private and public clouds, and 43% intend to further increase their use of this combination. Furthermore, 87% see clouds living in harmony with corporate data centers, rather than supplanting them. But 92% of respondents also said that as current in-house IT platforms get replaced, it will increasingly be with a cloud-based alternative.

Interestingly, 89% of organizations that have already invested in virtualization see private clouds as the next logical step for their IT infrastructure. In addition, 83% agreed that private clouds avoid the regulatory compliance challenges associated with public clouds.

A private cloud can play a key role in your disaster recovery strategy. We dig into the storage, LAN, and WAN requirements to build a cloud for DR. That and more–including articles on automated data centers and SaaS Web security–in the new all-digital issue of Network Computing. Download it here (registration required).